Very good game, I have played this game quite alot, and I love it the interface is a little low, it is more 2d gameplay than 3d, but as a "would a B'rel win against a Miranda" sort of game, it works, same with Starfleet Command I. the idea of the "Interstellar Concordium" a sort of Federation itself that believes that the overwhelming firepower and vastness of their fleet will bring peace, I feel that has been done before in Star Trek.

Overall this game had alot of potential but lost most of it. The games major flaws pertain to its stability. The game would crash along with a range of other glitches. The only thing it has going for it is the number of races and the fact that the empires actually are at war and the map is constantly changing.

Like SFC1, it also possessed many bugs that inhibited enjoyment of it in the beginning. However, once these bugs were squashed, Empires at War is the best game released under the Star Trek name that I have ever played, period, end of story. It perfectly reproduces the cinematic look and feel of the TOS movie era, particularly the Wrath of Khan. It also has something that few Star Trek games released since Interplay lost its license possess: tactical depth. There are a daunting number of systems at your command (though all that you really need to know to get started is how to move the ship and shoot) that once mastered, allow you to explore all sorts of combat enhancing tactics above and beyond just turning and shooting. Power management, tractor beams, electronic warfare, mine warfare (both beamed into the path of an enemy or dumped out the shuttle bay), sensor probes, special use shuttles, fighters, marines (useful for disabling certain systems on an enemy ship, taking over an enemy ship, defending against raids and deployable by transporter or shuttle) and various high risk, high gain maneuvers all let you fully explore what it means to be the captain of a starship in Star Trek during a time of war. Almost anything you can conceive of that does not involve reconfiguring the main deflector dish into a weapon of mass destruction you can do with your ship in this game. No other game gets Star Trek combat so right and had it been stable from release, it would likely be the standard for Star Trek gaming. Players of Dominion Wars, Bridge Commander, Armada or the newer Trek strategy (and I use the term strategy very generously here) games who felt artificially restricted would have deeply enjoyed this game.

First of, yes, another Interplay release that desperately needed patching. That aside, SFCII is SFC1 where every little bit of the game was a little bit better. More races, more ships, more tech/weopons, slightly better graphics, a more dynamic campaign engine. One complaint that comes to mind is the removal of officer levels. SFB and SFC1 both had officer levels from rookie to veteren to legendary, where their level affects the performance of your ships' systems. Overall, an improvement over the original, but I wasn't nearly as excited about it when it was released as I was when the original came out.

A wonderful PC game with fine visuals and entertaining game-play. However, the game's plot was derivative, completely non-canon and, relatively, brief. The entire Starfleet Command series suffered from substantial coding faults which were never fully patched. In fact, rather than correct the code, the producers would simply announce a "new" version TBA and abandon support for the current product. This tactic worked twice and then bombed on the third attempt. Still, I enjoyed many hours of online and local gaming with this series and "mod'd" SFC 2 extensively.